


the best there's ever been

by anthonydarling



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Brothers, Character Study, Demonic Sam, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Season/Series 05, Vague mentions of Dean/Cas, but we know how it ends, i just think he's neat, its the year of our lord 2020 and i cant stop thinking about supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27854878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthonydarling/pseuds/anthonydarling
Summary: For a moment, he thinks that Sam’s going to get pissed at him. The world is on its way to ending, and they’re being chased after by Michael and Lucifer and a bunch more of those self-righteous motherfuckers, probably, but Dean isn’t feeling too inclined to do anything about it- at least until the sun rises. Things’ll be different then, when it’s light out and the world feels like it reaches beyond what the impala’s headlights can illuminate.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	the best there's ever been

**Author's Note:**

> The song [the devil went down to georgia](https://youtu.be/sh7BZf7D5Bw) is mentioned here, I recommend that you give it a listen if you've never heard it, because it's incredible and also so _them_.

It’s three in the morning, and Dean is driving. He knows that it would have been smarter for him to stop at a motel for the night, but he’s too damn restless to sleep. He can’t shake the feeling that they’ll be attacked if they stop, as if them being on the move is any more likely to keep them safe from the all-powerful angels on their tail- as if the Enochian on their ribs isn’t enough to protect them.

It isn’t logical, he knows, but nothing about his and Sammy’s life has ever been logical.

Dean is wide awake and stone cold sober at three-oh-four in the morning, and Sam is snoring with a half-empty bottle of whiskey wedged between his knees. It’s the first time that Dean’s seen him sleep in a week. He’s dozed off a few times, but only when Dean was driving- so yes, okay, he’s sacrificing a good night’s sleep for Sam’s sake, sue him. The whiskey isn’t enough to knock him out. He hates that Sam keeps drinking, and he hates that he envies him for it. He hates a lot of things. It’s all he ever seems to do these days. 

Sam shifts in his sleep and makes a soft wounded-animal sound that makes Dean want to go back to Hell, find Lucifer, and rip him to fucking shreds. 

The radio crackles in and out as Dean hits a pothole- and Sam, who can never wake up when he needs to and never stays asleep when he should, startles awake with a high-pitched, terrified yelp. His arms fly up to cover his head and face, and the whiskey sloshes dangerously close to the lip of the bottle. Dean grits his teeth and doesn’t say anything about any of it, because he doesn’t know what’s going through Sam’s head or if his saying something would make this worse or better. He never knows what to do these days, and he hates it.

After a tense moment, Sam groans and scrubs at his face. “Where are we?” His voice is small, meek, and his speech is slurred. He’s scared and sad and drunk. Great. Dean still envies him for it. 

“‘Bout an hour out of Albany, headed northeast,” Dean says, soft. Sam grunts. 

“Where’re we headed?” 

Dean clicks his tongue. “Got a destination in mind?” 

For a moment, he thinks that Sam’s going to get pissed at him. The world is on its way to ending, and they’re being chased after by Michael and Lucifer and a bunch more of those self-righteous motherfuckers, probably, but Dean isn’t feeling too inclined to do anything about it- at least until the sun rises. Things’ll be different then, when it’s light out and the world feels like it reaches beyond what the impala’s headlights can illuminate. 

But Sam sighs and shakes his head. “Any- any word from Bobby? Or Cas?” 

“I don’t call and drive, Sammy.” No. He wishes there was. He hopes that Cas is safe, wherever the fuck he is. Sam would normally scoff at him for that, but he doesn’t make a sound.

So Dean drives and listens to Sam’s erratic breathing. Whatever he’d been dreaming about- Dean can and can’t imagine- had scared him well and badly. Dean wishes that he could help, wishes that he knew how to. He could say _talk to me_ and hope to a God that well and truly doesn’t exist that Sam will do so, but he knows that he’s more likely to get a sullen glare in reply if anything at all, and even then, if Sam were to talk, he wouldn’t know how to ease his fears. He can’t tell him that monsters aren’t real, or that the devil isn’t out to get him, or that he’s never going to vamp a demon ever again. They are real, he is, and he very well might. As badly as he wants to shield Sam, he knows that they’re long past able to do that. 

Instead, he says “got any song suggestions?” and gestures to the glovebox. He’s got too many damn cassettes in there. Too many of them are Dad’s.

“I don’t-” Sam takes a shuddering breath, and Dean takes a slow one. “No. I don’t know,” he says, staring down at his hands.

“That nightmare got you good,” Dean mutters. He’s pretty sure that he won’t get snapped at for it, and sure enough, Sam just laughs humorlessly and curls in on himself.

Then, because Dean can’t shut the fuck up, he says “so are you gonna get stuck in your head and work yourself into a panic attack, or can I turn this music up?”

“You’re always so careful,” Sam grits out, and Dean shoots back, “nothing but the best for you, sweetheart.” 

“The music won’t help,” he says. Dean would say that he’s bitching if he didn’t sound so damn sad about it. “Nothing helps. How long was I asleep, two hours? And I’m drunk. I’m drunk and I still can’t sleep.” 

“You were asleep for an hour and forty minutes, and you know that you slept because I’m driving,” Dean says, then, “is the drinking worth the hangover?” 

Sam does scoff at that. The moon casts shadows across his face, makes his cheekbones look too sharp. He hasn’t been eating, either. He’s just been drinking and quietly panicking. 

“I’m serious,” Dean grunts.

Sam’s quiet for a moment before he says “no”, all sullen and miserable. 

“Okay,” he murmurs. “How’s your head?”

“It’s okay.” 

“Okay.” Dean taps the steering wheel one, two, three times, and sighs. “I don’t- I’m sorry, Sam. I don’t know how to help.” 

Sam looks at him for the first time since he’s woken up. His eyes are sharp and focused, but he blinks slowly. “I never asked for your help, Dean,” he says, like he’s explaining something to a child. 

“Okay, and?” Dean scoffs. “Doesn’t mean I’m- that I don’t want to.” He hates this. 

“You’re so- damn it, Dean, you’ve got enough on your plate. I don’t need you to hold my hand every time I have a nightmare.” Sam genuinely sounds pissed off, and, like the useless feedback loop he is, Dean gets pissed too. 

“That’s not what I’m doing, Sam, I just- you’re- I don’t like seeing you like this.” 

A beat.

“Like what?” 

Dean watches the speedometer jump up to eighty, then back down to seventy. He uses the time to gather his thoughts, his breathing, to focus his anger into something a little more productive. “We’ve been backed into a corner,” he says, tense and measured, “and it’s taking a larger toll on you because you’ve got the worst of it. Worst-case scenario for me is that I get an archangel in my brain and half the world dies. Worst-case for you is that the devil himself shacks up in your head and turns the world into actual, literal Hell.” 

“Isn’t that worst-case for everyone?” Sam asks flatly. “You don’t want that either.”

“You’d never forgive yourself,” Dean replies, more honest than he wants to be, but when does he ever get what he wants, and he keeps his eyes on the road. “I would, and I do, if he’s right and you say yes in Detroit. I already do forgive you, and I know that you won’t.” 

Sam looks out of the window, at the empty fields and beginnings of the Appalachian foothills. They don’t spend a lot of time in this part of the country. Dean has a vague memory of Dad referring to it as the Bible belt, and of Sam, who couldn’t have been older than ten at the time, tensing at the term. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now, well. He recognizes with a pang of sadness that Sam’s hands are clasped together, around the whiskey bottle, and he’s looking up at what stars can be seen past the light pollution that the moon is causing. 

Sam is silent until three-thirty-two, a frankly fucking agonizing fifteen minutes later. Dean didn’t even turn up the music during that time- if Sam wanted the silence to be awkward, then sure, let it be awkward. This is his mental breakdown. He gets to call the shots. 

“Okay,” Sam says suddenly, and leans forward. Dean releases a breath he hadn’t known that he’d been holding as he opens the glovebox and rifles through it. “Question for you- what would you do, in my position? If you were given the place and you can see the time counting down, what would you do? How would you make this better?” _How would you make it hurt less? How do you make it less scary?_

“You lookin’ for a specific answer?” 

“Yeah.” Sam holds up a cassette tape and squints at it. “I already know it, I just want to hear it.” 

Dean breathes in and out, slowly. “You’re not me, Sam. I don’t expect you to-”

“I know that,” he snaps. “Tell me anyway.” 

“Okay. Okay, Sam. I’d get angry. You know I would.”

“Right,” Sam says softly, more to himself than to Dean, like he’s trying to absorb the thought. Dean, predictably, hates the idea of Sam becoming as angry as he is. 

“I wouldn’t make it easy for him. Even if I said yes, I’d let him know that I’m still looking for a way out.”

“He’d never get any rest.” Sam pops the tape in. 

“Not a damn second.” 

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how you do it, Dean,” and he sounds bone-tired. 

Dean thinks of Hell, and then pushes it away, pretends that the afterimage of it doesn’t still cloud his vision at times. “You don’t want to.” 

Sam doesn't acknowledge that, thank god, and hits play. _The Devil Went Down To Georgia_ begins to play over the speakers and Dean laughs, surprised. They hadn’t played this song in months. It had used to be a staple song for them- what wasn’t there to love about it, with its fiddle and pounding energy and _fuck you_ to the devil, but then everything had gone bad. Dean went to hell, and Sam started chugging demon blood. It was too close to home. And _then_ they found out that the son of a bitch is actually real. 

He’s real, and he wants to use Sam as a meat suit, and Sam’s shaking with the fear of it all. 

Dean turns up the volume until the bass shakes the windows. Sam whoops, loud and wild. Dean spares a glance at him- his shoulders are set tight, and his eyes are bright in a manic kind of way, and there’s a sharp smile on his face that looks to be more of a snarl.

“Sing it with me, Dean, come on,” Sam insists, and Dean does. 

Dean sings (shouts) with him until the last two stanzas, and then he listens, terrified and hurting and overwhelmingly proud, as Sam yells _“Devil, just come on back if you ever wanna try again- I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best there's ever been!”_ with a cracking defiant anger in his voice that Dean knows too well. He hears it whenever he's driving alone and shouting pleas for help and answers at whatever being out there that's able or willing or forced to listen, he hears it echoed in the nightmares that he has of his time in Hell, he hears it every time that he refuses to let Michael possess him. He hates, hates, hates that Sam’s being forced to carry that defensive anger with him now. He hates that it’s just a way of redirecting fear. 

But it doesn’t matter as long as it gives Sam hope. Nothing is more important than that. Dean knows that the world is fucking doomed, that even if he dodges Michael then Sam’s still gone terminal, he knows- they’re two tiny, insignificant humans who are trying to circumvent the apocalypse, to change the fucking word of God. He knows that it isn’t going to work, but they have to try.

Sam repeats the song. He’s grinning, and he’s crying. Dean revs the engine, and Sam whoops again in a way that makes it sound like a sob, and Dean’s chest and arms and hands ache with the knowledge that, even if they somehow miraculously manage to defeat Lucifer and stop the goddamn apocalypse, Sam is never going to be able to fully heal from this. 

**Author's Note:**

> WHAT IS THIS SHOW DOING TO MEEEEEEEEEEEE
> 
> I'm lobotomycas on tumblr


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